Checkmate

Re: Batman, the Disgustingly Powerful Ninja Wow I had no idea. Wish you coulda warned me BEFORE I posted.

Re: Batman, the Disgustingly Powerful Ninja I didn't say anything was wrong with it, I just don't like the genre. I don't like wire-fu. Just my personal taste.

Re: Batman, the Disgustingly Powerful Ninja If you were to follow my rules? I guess I'd keep them the same with 4 SPD and use a lot of Powers as skills. Sort of like what people do now for speedsters. I mean you can have a passable speedster with a 5 speed using speed tricks.Use a lot of EGO v. EGO to determine who would go first, since a lot of SPD/DEX's would be the same. Or I might make some combo of EGO/INT/DEX to determine initutive (maybe include a d6)

Re: Batman, the Disgustingly Powerful Ninja

Re: Batman, the Disgustingly Powerful Ninja Wow most of your points totally missed what I was trying to say: I'm not asking anyone to agree. I'm simply giving a frame of reference. I just told everyone when I say Human max I mean 20 not 30. You can think I'm a total loon, but at least you'll know what I'm talking about when I say human max. Exactly I don't like the NEW HERO System standards, I liked the 4th ed. And I didn't say I don't see much reason, I said it doesn't happen in my campaigns. What does this have to do with anything? I gave QS a higher speed right? Doesn't that mean by defualt I think he has a higher speed? I thought that would be self evident and didn't realize I'd have to explain to people that if I put a higher number next to their name I thought they had a faster speed. And spiderman isn't "widly recognized" take a look at the Marvel Superheroes game sometime and you'll see hunders of people with higher DEX than Spiderman. He's just the most popular fast guy. Now you've finally gotten to the part of the post that was my point. Totally wrong. How much formal training has Spidey and Quicksliver had in combat? Have either of them fought as much as Cap? No, this would give Cap MANY more skill levels, simulating his experience much better than simply raising his stats. There are two ways to make someone a better fighter, the first would be to raise their DEX, the second would be add skill levels. Spidey fights well because he has a natural ability. he wasn't trained, his style came naturally to him reprersented by a high DEX. Cap was trained to fight. He honed that training in the field. He isn't natually dexterous, he trained his body. Skill levels better represent this. Please forget the whole speed chart I created. It is totally irrelevant. Anything past SPD 5 I just made up on the fly.

Re: Who's the most evil villain in CU? But why do we consider Blowtorch insane? Because he likes to set people on fire? But that measure Black is a total loon. I still say motivation has to play a role in determining evil. Ifyou're only killing to get something, and you wouldn't kill if there was a better way, that makes you less evil (moer selfish of course) than someone who kills for the pleasure of it.

Re: Batman, the Disgustingly Powerful Ninja No if they pay double they can, but very few do, and it certainly wouldn't be in SPD. Yes but he also travels to different dimensions, and a lot of time not training as well as getting a late start in life. How would his training make him better at walking a balance beam, or floor routines than an Olympian who's trained their whole life? I do things differently. A lot of people think they need to give Batman a 32 DEX and 7 SPD (don't laugh I've seen a lot of people go this high on the speed) becasue they think they need that to make him fight as well as he does in the comics. I reduce the stats and add more skill levels. It all comes out the same, so what's the differnce you ask? I feel skill levels better represent training. Stats also increase other incedentals that Skill Levels don't (Iceman and the balance beam for instance, or Batman with his 7 SPD running 35 MPH). As far as the whole Wonder Woman, Flash, Superman thing, the point of this wasn't to debate who I thought was faster (although just because Flash can out run Supes, doesn't mean Flash has a higher SPD), I just threw in the first supers I could think of that would be close to that number.

Re: Who's the most evil villain in CU?

Re: Who's the most evil villain in CU? P.S. (because the edit thingy isn't working for me) What sounds worse to you? Reproter: You just killed 6 billion people, why'd you do it? Black: Ultimate power. Or.. Reporter: You just killed 600 people, why'd you do? Blowtorch: Dang that was fun!

Re: Who's the most evil villain in CU?

Re: Batman, the Disgustingly Powerful Ninja

Re: Who's the most evil villain in CU? I think to really determine who is most evil, you have to look at motivation. Why are the killing all these people, rather than how many people they can kill. Dr. Destroyer wants to rule the world. Killing people is just a means to an end. He may or may not enjoy killing people, he just does it to accomplish his goal. I think this is less evil than say: Blowtorch kills people becuase he likes to watch people die, that's pretty evil if you ask me. Menton is like a woman, he doesn't kill you he destroys (while keeping alive) the people closest to you just because you insult him, that's pretty evil too.

Re: Batman, the Disgustingly Powerful Ninja I agree with Andrew. Don't include EVERY skill you've ever seen him use, high skill rolls (+ Overall levels) and the guy will have some clue about everything. Instead of giving him all those science skills, and misc. skills he uses once, give him cramming. I could make a very SCARY Batman, if I he were played in MY world. You see I don't agree with what used to be called the "arms race". In my world, Green Lantern would get his butt kicked my a Navy SEAL if he ever lost his ring. Batman has an 18 STR, 20 DEX, and a 4 SPD. Heck Spiderman would have about a 7 SPD and 32 DEX. I think when you keep non-supers like Batman and Robin, The Joker, etc. out of the superhero range (above 20) everything else just sort of falls into place. Let's take a look at speed which is what a lot of people say where Hero System breaks down when you get to the upper levels: Regular people (this includes basic cops, regualr military): 2 SPD Cyclopse and most other non-speed powered Supers/ELITE Military: 3 SPD Highly Trained Supers (Batman, Captain America): 4 SPD Have powers that make them quicker (Wolverine, Creeper): 5 SPD Nightcrawler: SPD 6 Spiderman: SPD 7 Wonder Woman: SPD 8 Martian Manhunter, Quicksilver: SPD 9 Flash: SPD 10 Superman: SPD 11 I think everything fits in nicely. You could adjust a few, I'm not sure Nightcrawler really deserves a 6, but you get the idea.

Re: Marvel/Dc Writeups I've given up on this argument. A long time ago there was an argument that Hero System breaks down at the upper levels. I tried to show the point that if you ignore what Steve Long says and put things the way they used to be when the system worked better and made human max 20 again. If you give Batman an 18 STR, 20 DEX, and build everything from there, but let's not start that argument again.

Re: A new thread, asking for help in building a rather unusual character... Instead of mental invisibiltiy use Desolid only vs mental powers. That's the only real way Hero has to be invulnerable.

Re: Problem with creating a FH spell. That's a neat construct and all, but wouldn't it just be easier just to link a Dispel to an Images? You could still add the Skill vs Skill to the dispel. With the UBO advantage, all the other caster has to do is turn it off. They're still in control of the power. Edit: Oops, I didn't realize this thread was 8 pages when I posted. guess I should go back and read the rest.

Re: Help me with my Champions plot Maybe Gilgamesh is still around. Maybe all his time on Earth has made him a little loopy and he wasn't to take over the world because he can rule it better. To this end he became the Supreme Serpent and is in charge of Viper (wouldn't that be an interesting twist). Viper is actually trying to help, as Gilgamesh learned where his seal was and some unsuspecting Museum Worker has accidently activated the seal and released the Beast. Viper is trying to re-capture the beast. When the heroes arrive and defeat Viper, they in actually allow the Beast to escape.

This probably isn't the right place for this, but I saw an essay written by Ralph Koster who is a game designer for Massive Multiplayer Online Games. He wrote this about one of his games Ultima Online, but those of us who have been around awhile will see why I'm posting it here: May 5th, 1998 A Story About A Tree I'd like to tell you a story about a tree. This tree grows in a different virtual world than Ultima Online--one of the many text muds that exist on the Internet. It grows in a Garden of Remembrance, and the ground around it is littered with flowers and boxes of chocolates and pieces of paper with heartfelt poems written on them. And there is a plaque there as well--"In memory of Karyn," it reads. The story I'd like to tell is the story of that plaque and that person, someone I never met. Karyn first logged on to that virtual world quite some time ago. She was from Norway. She kept coming back, and brought friends with her--some of whom did not speak English very well, but for whom she served as an interpreter. She made friends. Eventually she ran a website all about that virtual world, and posted on that site pictures of herself, where all could see she had a lovely smile. As her ties to the world grew, she started a guild. She called it the Norse Traders, and with a lot of hard work, she got it off the ground and developed it into one of the most popular and well-known guilds in the game. It was a merchants' guild that also adventured together, and pretty soon the folks involved had made good friendships. In March of this year, some of those friends started to notice that they hadn't seen Karyn in a while. You know how it goes in the online world--people don't leave, they just fail to show up, usually, and you never know what happened to them. But in this case there was her website to go to. So people went looking for Karyn. A day later the news filtered out across the bulletin boards, via emails, and eventually onto the welcome message when you first logged in: Karyn was dead. She had died in a head-on collision while test-driving a new car. And it had happened two months before, in January, and none of us had known. Her parents knew that she had friends on the Internet--they didn't quite understand what she did online, or who those friends were, but they knew that there were people out there somewhere who might want to learn the news. It took them some time to find her webpage, and to learn how to put a message up. But they did it, and they attached news items about the car crash, in Norwegian. The outpouring of grief on the virtual world was immediate. People who had not logged on in months heard about it from the game's email newsletter. A memorial service was organized. And eventually, a Garden of Remembrance was created, and a tree planted in Karyn's memory. Players made the pilgrimage to the garden in order to leave tokens of their grief. Code was changed so that items left in this manner became permanent parts of the world. Throughout all the events, however, there ran a common thread. People could not get a handle on feeling grief for someone they had never actually met. They could not quite understand feeling a deep sense of loss over someone they "just played a game with." When describing their loss, they had to resort to "I once formed a party with her and we went into a dungeon." They couldn't quite express the feeling that a member of their community was gone. And it was that sense--the Norse Traders had fallen apart since January, and now they knew why. Because Karyn, the person at the center of it, was not there. In a very real sense, they came to realize that the strange unease they had felt about hearing of her death with a two-month time lag might have originated in the fact that the loss to the community was actually felt when she stopped logging in--not when the news finally came. In the end, that garden and that tree served not only as a memorial to a well-loved and much-missed person, but as a marker of a moment, a moment in which the players of an online game realized that they weren't "playing a game." That the social bonds that they felt within this "game" were Real. There's a children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit, about a stuffed plush rabbit which desperately wishes to become Real. And in the end, the love of the little boy whose toy it is makes this come true. In the end, the social bonds of the people in a virtual environment make it more than just a game. They make it Real. Sometimes it takes a moment of grief to make people realize it, and sometimes people just come to an awareness over time, but the fundamental fact remains: when we make a friend, hurt someone's feelings, suffer a loss, or accomplish something in an online world, it's real. It's not "just a game." Ultima Online was designed with a basic philosophy in mind: that we were providing an online world, one that could live and breathe and develop in new and unpredictable ways. We wanted to provide scope for players to develop online communities in a way that no other online world had done. It is amazing and gratifying to see some of the results today: volunteer police forces, roleplayer taverns, small-scale Olympics, and fledgling forms of government. And yes, sadly, a few places where funerals have been held, for in any community of this size, there will be losses. The thing that we should never lose sight of is that we, by participating in this new sort of community, are breaking new ground that will undoubtedly prove important over the next decade, as the Internet acquires more significance in business, education, socializing, and other areas outside of gaming. The dilemmas that players of UO wrestle with every day in the form of how reputation should work, what to do about harassment, etc, are the key problems of virtual reality for the next several years. And we are only able to tackle them because you, the citizens of this virtual Britannia, are more than just players--you are a self-aware community that reaches beyond "game" and into the Real. I am not going to let anyone tell me that the Garden of Remembrance isn't Real, or that the grief we all felt over Karyn's death was not Real. And I hope that UO players aren't going to let anyone tell them that their experiences within UO aren't Real either, that it's "just a game." It may be for some people, but we all know better, don't we? For Karyn's sake, and also for our own. -Designer Dragon This little essay is based on a speech given at the last Austin UO Players Lunch in March. RJMHughes We Remember.

Re: Hero System is Just Alright With Me I have to agree. A lot of people change or make up rules because Hero calls thier stat something else. For instance in one game I was thinking about playing, we were going to use the setting Vampire the Masquerade. One of the GM's (there were 3) wanted to make a new stat called Bloodpool (or blood points I don't remember) but the way it actually worked was just like END. The other 2 GM's ended up agreeing with me and talked the third into it...and I still didn't end up playing after all the fuss I started (still feel bad about that). I think people are two quick to make up new rules instead of trying to make what's there work. Some of the things I don't like about Hero System are: If someone jumps out of a plan it falls faster than if the person flew it into the ground. When the pilot is flying, the plane only goes on it's or the pilots phases whichever is lower. When the plane in unmanned it goes every segment. I realize there is no real way to fix this, you just take the good with the bad. Damage Shield is WAY too expensive for what it does in 5th edition, I use 4th ed. rules for this. Hero Designer is a GM's worst nightmare. With all those limitations right there at easy reach, players have a tendency to just start piling them on. Now I have to go though each one and explain that Iron Man's armor can't take the limitation "Real Weapon". Not only that, but with all the math being done for you in a second, Min/Max'ing is even easier. You can tell in a second how much a certain limit would help reduce the cost and sometimes get an extra die for no cost etc. Killer, Some of what you say makes sense (invisiblity IS shapeshift, never thought about that before) but I disagree with the power attack/Energy Blast. The name should probably be changed, but I would leave everything the same except call it Ranged Attack. So you would have Killing Attack: Ranged, Killing Attack:Hand-to-Hand, Attack:Ranged, Attack: Hand-to-Hand I also agree with calling them Limitations not disadvantages. It Limits the power doesn't necesarily disadvantage the power.

Re: Hero System is Just Alright With Me Wow, good call. I had never considered that before. When you put it that way, they don't bug me like they used to

Re: Hero System is Just Alright With Me While a bit off topic, some of the things OddHat stuck a cord in me and I just feel the need to vent: Is it just me, or are the Talents in some of the new books downright idiotic? I started getting a funny feeling with Fantasy Hero. Talking to animals shouldn't be a talent, I thought, but whatever. I finally saw red in Dark Champions. Now someone explain to me how the H E double hockey stick this is a Talent: Skill Master cost: 6 points; +3 with any one skill. Well No kidding??? How is that a talent and not just common sense? It's crap like that that bugs me about Hero System.

The book says that if you have BOECV Entangle you have to have the advantage "vs EGO not STR". My question is can I have advantage "vs EGO not STR" without BOECV?

In Hero Designer it won't let you take break out with EGO instead of STR on entangle unless you first take BOECV. I looked in the FAQ and didn't see the rule (I may have missed it). Is this the rule, or is HD wrong? To explain the effect I'm going for is from the movie Kiss of the Dragon, where the Martial Artist sticks an accupuncutre needle in a certain spot and it blocks the target's Chi paralyzing them. The target would have to will thier Chi to flow again.

Re: Super-Skills Megathread Improved: Fight Past the Pain add +20 STUN and +10 CON only vs. being stunned. Think Nicolas Cage in Con Air when he got shot in the arm and just kept walking towards the guy like nothing happened (talk about a presence attack)

Re: Favorite Abuses Wow that's just mean man. I used to think I could powergame with the best of them, but I'm not even in the same league.